That's bullshit.

The problem that people like you don't seem to understand is that online communications can be secure, unless the companies owning the servers themselves cooperate and companies have to cooperate if they have to do so by law.

It's only the US that has such a huge budget for spying on people's communications and the US is also part of a select handful of countries going to such great lengths to suppress the freedom of speech about it.

If I were to start a company in Romania (which is part of EU btw), the NSA can suck my dick as there's absolutely nothing they could do to make me cooperate and keep my mouth shut while doing it.

What is the whole "people like you" bit?

He made a valid statement and didn't express much else of his opinions or state of mind.

Unfair to immediately lump somebody into a pre-judged bucket for a single statement.

That's the real bullshit here.

True, but I am talking about the practical risk based on what is known about the spying.

What really bothers me about this is not the actual spying - I always assumed that governments do engage in whatever spying they can get away with.

What really bothers me about this is that U.S. companies and individuals have to keep their interactions with the NSA a secret, while obeying whatever demands the NSA has, including the installing of back-doors.

Trust is a fragile thing and we rely on trust for conducting business and for living our lives. My trust in U.S.-based companies has been shaken. Even if the affected companies (such as Google, Microsoft, Apple) want to be trustworthy for their customers, they can be coerced by law to obey whatever the NSA demands and they must also keep it a secret, with absolutely no transparency - they aren't even allowed to say "yes, the NSA demanded some things and we unfortunately complied". Even worse, they can be coerced into making public statements that are full of lies.

I can no longer trust any U.S. based company again.

For example, right now I'm using Skype. But what if the Skype client has a backdoor allowing one to open and listen to my mike any time they want (it's a proprietary blob, we'll never know). What if this backdoor gets hacked and used by people that are not part of the U.S. government? So in spite of the best intentions of the people working on Skype and the NSA; even if I've got "nothing to hide", Skype is all of a sudden a security liability and nothing (short of an open-source client that I can compile and run) can prove otherwise, because Microsoft isn't allowed to be open about it. And I can no longer rely on the fragile trust I've had for Microsoft, because Microsoft can be coerced into being untrustworthy.

See how it goes? We'll see how this unfolds over the next years, however the damage done to U.S. companies will prove to be massive.

This is the most well reasoned argument i heard - and reflect my sentiments perfectly. Its not that i am too afraid the NSA can read my email or listen to my phone convo, but that they can coerce, "lawfully", the ISP/telco to do things against my wishes, and keep it secret from me.

These gag orders are the kind of things that creep into society and they are the first weapon against would-be activists that's perceived to be against the corporate interest (or the interest of the elite). It doesn't take much for chilling effect to set in. Fight it now, or it will be too late when it has the power to threaten the laymen.

>however the damage done to U.S. companies will prove to be massive.

Will?

It probably already has, in lieu of current European rattling.

I don't expect that GOOG or MSFT will suffer any damage in short term. But in long term they have proved unreliable. This erodes confidence. And if it keeps eroding, it will eventually cause them to collapse.

I'll be doing my earnest to move away from any non-OS tool. And will advocate others to do so as well.

That's kind of the same argument for European businesses and governments to not use Microsoft/American products. At least if they did it within EU, they would be accountable, and the laws prohibit most of it. But the US spying is unaccountable to Europeans, so they can do whatever they want.

The only proper answer to that is to stop using American products (at least until the US government can prove with extreme oversight from Europeans and Latin Americans and others, that they aren't abusing their spying power anymore).

It was merely claimed that PRISM was designed to target foreign communications.

That was entirely a lie. From day one their system has been targeting Americans. The proof is overwhelming at this point.

There's often a critical distinction between what gets claimed and what actually occurs in government. With a government that is so undeserving of trust, that's a very important distinction to keep in mind.

I don't follow US news - is that what they're telling the voters?

I think it is documented even in the leaked slides.

You're accidentally mixing PRISM with the most recent leaks that say Microsoft has given the NSA ways to bypass encryption methods and so forth.

Or they don't have to go to those lengths to intercept national communications ;)